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Originally Posted by Bert X
I think you're thinking too much like a lawyer, and not enough like a politician.
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True.
This guy reminds me of some awful garbage I've seen insofar as contemptuous court behaviour and frivolous prison claims filed by nuisance prisoners. The funniest--or lack thereof insofar as taxpayer waste--was a lawsuit I had to address as a judicial clerk with a long term career criminal prisoner called Concepcion (no kidding--really his last name--how coincidentally appropriate) who sued the state for violating his reproductive rights by not supplying him with sexual access to impregnate his girlfriend or alternatively a state-paid artificial insemination of her with his sperm sample. He even already had several kids with different women, but never supported them given his ongoing anti-social criminal behaviour.
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Originally Posted by Bert X
IYou and I might not have any respect for Saddam Hussien, but right now he's not concerned at all with legal procedure or even getting a verdict. He's doing what he can to delegitimize the court to the arab street. He's going to do everything he can to Americanize it. The American invastion was not legitimate in the eyes of much of the world, including the arab street. This court that we've set up is already questionable to even many in Western Europe, not to mention the Middle East.
Saddam already knows he's going to die. All he's trying to do now is die a hero. It's the same idea they used in the war. They cannot win so they fight a bit and then melt into the woodwork, and shoot you in the back and plant bombs on the side of the road, it is what they can do, and so that is what they do. This is what he can do, and so, he does.
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I think your analysis is correct. He is trying to build his legacy before death using the trial whilst pulling down the US and the new Iraqi government as best he can in the process. I would expect no less of him than what he is doing.
My admittedly lawyer-biased thinking is that the court would better establish its authority if it humbled him the way any other authoritative court must humble anyone who would show utter contempt for it. If the public sees a paper-tiger court that is a wuss in front of a globally known notorious former leader who is now deposed and in chains who clearly did the things he is accused of committing, then my concern is that Saddam will succeed in getting the people to disrespect the new system through his own tolerated disrespect of it. Even myself I think the court is spineless and unworthy of respect when I see it allowing some prisoner to dictate the pace of the trial and frustrate its process with BS and antics.